Researchers find antibodies that prevent HIV
POSTED September 7, 2009 - 11:39 | POSTED BY Kangna Agarwal
Last edited by Harpreet Bhagrath on September 7, 2009 - 15:09
The research team from the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla mentioned that this discovery might help in designing a better AIDS vaccine to protect the people who develop the disease.
Dr. Seth F. Berkley, president and chief executive of The International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) that funded and coordinated the research said, "This is opening up a whole new area of science."
HIV-infected patients sans symptoms used
In order to find the neutralizing antibodies, the researchers took the blood samples of 1800 people from Thailand, Africa and Australia who had been infected with the HIV virus for at least three years but did not exhibit the symptoms of the deadly disease.
Dennis Button, a scientist at the Scripps Research Institute, who headed the research team said, “We said if we want broadly neutralizing antibodies, we should look for people, infected individuals, who are making them.”
He added, “The key thing about the antibodies we’ve found is that they’re more potent than previous ones and that’s great for a vaccine.”
New process unveils the antibodies
Then the samples were sent to the researchers at the Monogram Biosciences Laboratories in South San Francisco who adopted a new technology to determine which antibodies were more resistant to the virus.
The team developed a process wherein the enzyme present in the virus used to glow whenever it entered a cell. But when similar action wasn’t observed by the team, it meant that the patient’s antibodies had fought off the virus.
Eventually, the blood samples containing antibodies that fought off the HIV virus were sent to the Theraclone Sciences in Seattle for isolation of the antibodies.
The researchers at the Theraclone Sciences isolated two antibodies, called PG9 and PG16, from the blood sample of one African patient. The team found that these antibodies were able to resist about three-quarters of the 162 strains of HIV.
During the research, one crucial fact had also been revealed that these antibodies target those portions of the HIV virus that were yet not considered by the researchers for the cure of disease.
The researchers said that the findings of this study might not directly lead to a vaccine, but the discovery of these antibodies have certainly provided a road map for the production of a new and better vaccine that could be used in the treatment of the infected patients.
According to the report of World Health Organization (WHO), at least 25 million people from all over the world have died from AIDS and approximately 33 million people are currently infected with the deadly virus.
